The Spark GraphX library is the RDD-based graph processing library, but GraphFrames is a Spark DataFrame-based graph processing library that is available as an external package. Spark GraphX supports many graph processing algorithms, but GraphFrames supports not only graph processing algorithms, but also graph queries. The major difference between graph processing algorithms and graph queries is that graph processing algorithms are used to process the data hidden in a graph data structure, while graph queries are used to search for patterns in the data hidden in a graph data structure. In GraphFrame parlance, graph queries are also known as motif finding. This has tremendous applications in genetics and other biological sciences that deal with sequence motifs.
From a use case perspective, take the use case of users following each other in a social media application. Users have relationships between them. In the previous sections, these relationships were...